Empowering The Bicycle Traveler

Touring Bike Components

The temperature is going to be well below freezing this New Year's Eve day and several inches of snow have fallen in the last 48 hours. A combination of de-icer, sand spread by the highway district and traffic has left the busiest roads mostly bare and dry. But driveways and side streets are covered with Read More

A Bike Touring Wheelset

A hub is laced to a rim with spokes and nipples in order to create a wheel. Elementary I know but semantics are important if the aspiring bike tourist is to make him/her self understood. I don't want to go into how to build a bicycle wheel because there are hundreds of YouTube videos and Read More

More About the Best Touring Tire

I enjoy reading the posts and looking at the pictures on the Pondero blog. The latest post happens to be a review of the Schwalbe Marathon Dureme tire. Check it out and look at some of his other articles while you're at it. Good stuff. I copied the following from the Road Bike Rider website Read More

Top mount thumb shifters

So I had a Bridgestone MB-1 circa 1992, I think....might have been '93. A poor fellow, down on his luck, or perhaps his brain addled from meth or crack cocaine, determined that he was deserving of such a bike. And so he took it. The Bike Hermit is always happy to help those less fortunate Read More

Rivet Saddles

My personal quest for a comfortable bicycle saddle which I can sit on for consecutive hours in relative comfort came to an end (uh,huh,huh) when I tried the Gilles Berthoud Aspin saddle. But that solution didn't work out for my wife and riding/touring partner. The shape wasn't quite right. For her the Rivet Pearl saddle Read More